2. Spend Time With People
Don’t use alone time as an excuse to stay away from people. I’ve never known anyone to receive long term healing in isolation. It’s just not the way God designed us.
You need relationships deeply. So you need to be texting people, hanging out with people, talking to people, sharing with people, spending time with people. It doesn’t have to be all about you. It’s not that you’re going to people and going, hey, I just want to talk about my burnout again. That that may or may not be appropriate all the time. I do think you need to talk to somebody about it, but I’m just talking about doing life with people and encouraging other people.
In fact, the more time you spend encouraging other people, the more life it gives to you. There’s a great book on influence called, Never Eat Alone, and it’s all about connecting with people. And it basically says, don’t waste your mealtime eating a meal in the car by yourself—always try to set up a lunch with somebody. I’m not challenging you to do that, necessarily. But do try to find opportunities to get together with people. You need people in your life.
Our church staff has a weekly meeting and it’s one of the most life-giving times of my week, not so much because we get a lot of planning done, but because of the time and proximity with each other, hanging out, and laughing together. We laugh a lot with one another. We laugh a lot at one another.
Spend time with people, have a date night with your spouse, get away from the business, the overwhelm and just spend some time with people.
3. Realign With Your Purpose
I’m a Christian. I have a relationship with God, and one of the best books ever written is The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.
It really has been a driving force in my life because I believe strongly that I’m planned for God’s pleasure. So I have this purpose of worshiping. I gather with a church family once a week and I worship with them and I pray daily and that’s part of my worship.
I also believe I was made for relationships with other people. That’s one of God’s purposes for my life. So I’m in a small group and I get together with people and I try to encourage people.
One of my purposes is to serve other people. I do that in a lot of different ways—by preaching, by blogging, sometimes by counseling, or advising.
I believe it’s healthy to sit down sometimes and just write a sentence that sums up what you are most passionate about doing with your life.
I recently did this. I sat down and I wrote out a sentence about my life and it was really, really short.
I want to spend my life helping people find freedom.
Out of that came a renewed emphasis within my church on preaching a series about healing and helping some ministries get off the ground that are designed to help people find freedom.
Out of that came my podcast and another website that I’m developing with a friend called The Unstrapped Life. It’s going to be all about financial freedom and work freedom and life freedom.
As you realign with your purpose, you’re going to have to refocus and weed some things out. There’s a lot of power in saying no, and one of the factors that leads to burnout is that we don’t like to say no to people. So we say yes to everything.
Our unwillingness to say no ultimately comes out of trying to find our identity in the affirmation of people. If I say yes to them, they’ll affirm me, they’ll like me, they’ll appreciate me. I need to serve people out of my purpose, but not feel obligated to commit to serving people in ways that don’t align with my purpose.
If you’re in leadership, delegation is key. And I don’t even like the word delegation—I like the word empowering.
I wrote book about how the church can use social media. So that’s a big area for me. Letting go of our church’s social media was a huge challenge for me. But I did. I entrusted Martha Brown, who now serves as our Communications Director. She does a phenomenal job with social media—better than I would have done, better than I would be doing.
She manages it consistently and gives our church a great voice on social media. I was afraid to let it go because if I don’t control it, but the fact is, by giving it away, I got to empower someone else who now gets a lot of fulfillment from it and does a great job with it.
Write out a sentence that describes what your life is all about. What are you gifted to do? What are you called to do? What is your shape? What is your identity? What are you here to do? Mine is to help people find freedom. What is yours?
How has God wired you to serve other people, to impact the world? What do you do with all of that?
So, that’s how you recover from burnout. And that’s also how you prevent burnout.
I don’t think it’s about balance. I don’t think it’s about priorities. I don’t even think it’s about time management, specifically. It is about making sure that your day, your relationships, your activities are aligned with God’s purpose for your life.
Remember, you are needed. God loves you. You can do this. You have in you what it takes to make an impact on the world.
This article originally appeared on BrandonACox.com.